[guardian-dev] Moving beyond XMPP

[Nathan of Guardian]

On 12/06/2013 02:57 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> I agree that I think a big focus on usability bugs would be helpful.  We get
> quite a few downloads of it, but we have only about 25-30% ongoing users.  I
> don't know how that compares to other Android apps but I think we should
> improve that ratio.  Then we'll have more users, and more people recommending
> it to others.

I think that it is so easy to install apps, that you have many, many
drive-by users who try something once, and then are distracted and move
on. That is not to say that we shouldn't do a better job of keeping
people around, using our app, but I also think that while 25-30% seems
low, that it isn't as bad as it may seem.

Alternatively, the reasons that people stay in a social network have
more to do with social pressure, and not necessarily usability,
specifically.

> It sounds like it would be a lot of work to integrate support for the
> proprietary protocols, and it would be probably quite trivial for those
> companies to specifically block ChatSecure on their networks.

There are open implementations of WhatsApp's protocol in Python already
that are used without being blocked.

https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup
https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup/wiki/yowsup-cli
https://github.com/tgalal/wazapp

> In the long run, it probably makes sense to add support for as many protocols
> as possible, like Pidgin/Purple/Adium do.  That will be a large undertaking
> beyond what we are currently capable of.

Yes, we are back to that cat and mouse game of the AIM days, I agree.
Still, if it is only a few tweaks to XMPP, then I am for it. If it is
100% custom, then not so much.

+n